- There are two ways of finding participants for your study.One, is to do it yourself.The other is to pay somebody to recruit them for you.If you have more time on your hands than available money,you'll probably be doing it yourself.First, you have to work out what attributesyour study participant should have.Then, you need to find a large number of peoplewho are interested in helping you out,and match them against your attributes.We'll talk in detail about the participant attributesthat you should look for in the next video.

But for now, just remember it probably won't workvery well just dragging people in off the streetto be participants in your usability study.You'll have specific recruiting requirements based onyour product, the questions you have, your location,and whether you're looking at makingyour existing customers happy, or at acquiring new ones.There are many ways of findingsuitable people to be participants.You could use classified ads on sites like Craigslist.You can run online ads using Google AdWords,or physical ads in locations like supermarkets, libraries,and other places with bulletin boards.

You could use online forums or social media.Here, it's best to direct people to a page on your siteso they know that the posting is legitimate.If you've planned ahead, you could add an"I'll give feedback" product improvement checkboxto your registration and "Contact Us" forms.You might be able to persuade your sales teamto let you contact some existing customerswho would be open to this sort of research.You could obviously also advertisefor participants on your site.But be aware that if you do thisyou'll be introducing what's called selection bias.

In other words, the people who come to your sitehave already self selected themselvesas being interested in your company.So they have more knowledge of your productsthan the general population will.And that could mean they behave differently than peoplewho've never been exposed to your products before.You'll need to start recruiting at leastone to two weeks before the scheduled study.It'll take time to find enough people.Even if you end up with a long listof potential participants it's hard to find individualswho will be available at the exact timesyou need them to turn up.I normally work on the assumption that I'll be callingabout ten people for each participantI end up scheduling for any given study.

That means you'll need a participant database of at least 50and preferably many more individuals to draw from.If you have the money, it's much easierto use an existing recruiting company.It's not cheap.Costs for recruiting each participantcan run from $100 to $300,and that doesn't include the participant gratuity.However, the company does everything for you.From initial finding suitable participantsthrough giving the directions on how to get to your locationand even calling them to remind them to show up.

If you add up all the time it'll take you to do these tasks,that cost could seem very worthwhile.Here's one tip if you decide to use a recruiting company.They're often used to scheduling focus groups,so it helps if you use the industry jargonand tell them you're running individual in-depth interviews,so they know to only schedule one participant for each slot.For your first couple of studies until you'veconvinced someone to give you the budget to usean external recruiter, you'll most likelybe doing all the recruiting yourself.

The rest of this course makes the assumptionthat you're recruiting participants yourself.Even if you do use an external recruiter,you'll still need to be aware of the same issues,and you'll still need to give your recruitera set of participant attributesand potential recruiting questions.

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Author

Released

11/2/2015

Run your own basic usability testing to find out just what your users need from your website, application, or device—and learn where to focus design improvements to have the biggest impact. Author Chris Nodder shows how to design a study so that it answers your questions, how to recruit the right participants, and how to set up the test environment. The course also teaches you how to moderate and observe a usability test, interact with participants and ask the right kind of questions, and then analyze the results and share them with your team in a meaningful way.